Who Was Adam Lanza, And What Was The Nature Of His Relationship With His Mother?

"Something happened with Adam," the person in touch with Lanza said. "Given the amount of time they were spending with each other, it was a sudden shift."

During this period, Adam also cut contacts with his brother, Ryan, who lived in Hoboken, N.J., and worked at a New York City financial firm.

Around this time, in 2010, Nancy Lanza was no longer in communication with her younger brother, James Champion, a military veteran and a ranking officer with Kingston police. Adam had looked up to his Uncle Jim, but Nancy began to discourage Adam from emulating his uncle, according to LaFontaine.

LaFontaine said he ran into Champion in Kingston in 2011 or early 2012 and asked him about his sister. By that time, after 10 years of regular contact, Nancy Lanza was no longer communicating regularly with LaFontaine.

"'I haven't heard from her in a while,'" LaFontaine said Champion told him. "And he looked down at the ground and he looked sad and he said, 'I don't know, she's not talking to me anymore.'"

LaFontaine said, "I thought, well, that's odd because she really loved her baby brother and so I wondered what had happened. I didn't ask him, I didn't think he wanted to talk about it, but there was something amiss."

Champion did not return phone and Internet messages for comment. When The Courant went to his Kingston home, a sign on the door asked members of the media to respect his privacy.

After the divorce, Nancy Lanza traveled more, leaving Adam alone for days at a time, something, she told friends, she was doing to encourage Adam to be more independent.

She went to fine restaurants in Connecticut and Boston and traveled to England, New Orleans and San Francisco on occasion, her friends said. In an email to LaFontaine after her divorce in the fall of 2009, she said she was in Boston "on a regular basis," and usually stayed at the Fairmont, the Four Seasons or the Ritz-Carlton.

When she went away, she would leave prepared meals in the refrigerator for Adam. She spent this past Thanksgiving in northern New England with family, one in a series of trips she took without her son.

"She was very comfortable leaving him alone for several days at a time," said Bergquist, who was friends in Newtown with Nancy Lanza.

Adam eventually earned his high school diploma, according to a person close to Peter Lanza. He also worked part time at a computer-repair shop in Newtown until it went out of business.

In the summer of 2008, when he was 16, Adam enrolled in classes at Western Connecticut State University. He did well, earning a 3.26 grade-point average. He received an A in a computer class, an A-minus in an American history class and a B in a macroeconomics class. He was given a C in philosophy, and he dropped out of a German language class.

His mother told friends that Adam embraced a more adult environment in college, but it didn't last. He was out in a year. In 2010, he enrolled in classes at Norwalk Community College but dropped out in the first semester.

After that, there was no more school for the 19-year-old. He sprouted to about 5 feet 10 and got his driver's license in 2010. He played the saxophone and a stringed instrument, and was studying Mandarin Chinese.

During this period, friends and family members said, Nancy Lanza disclosed little about her struggles with Adam. But on one recent occasion, she confided in Rich Collins, another friend in Newtown and father of a boy with autism. Something was bothering her, she told Collins.

"He was very sensitive to touch and didn't want to be touched," Collins said of Adam. "That used to hurt her. She would get upset about that."

Asked about the Asperger's experience, the person close to Peter Lanza said Adam's father found it challenging.

Family With Firearms

Adam was exposed to guns at an early age and he continued to shoot at target ranges with his mother through his late teens, friends and other sources said. Shooting weapons was something Peter and Nancy Lanza did with their children dating to the early days in Kingston.

But after the killings, investigators would focus on Adam Lanza's involvement with firearms and his immersion in the video-game culture as they tried to unravel the riddle of Lanza's last two years.

Nancy Lanza purchased four firearms between 2010 and 2012, according to law enforcement sources. During that time, she told a friend, landscaper Dan Holmes of Newtown, that she took both sons target shooting at a gun range.

"She said she took her kids target shooting, that they bonded over that," said Holmes, who planted flower beds and tended the 2 acres surrounding Nancy and Peter Lanza's $500,000 home.